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Hannah Arendt and the Constitution of Freedom
This week I gave a lecture at the University of São Paulo in Brazil that asked, Why Law Alone Can’t Defend Democracy—and why Only Power Can Check Power.03-30-2025
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The Pillars Have Shattered
For Hannah Arendt, the rise of science, and the loss of civilization's pillars- religion, customs, and traditions- helped lead to the loss of a shared world. This process turned us inside ourselves, towards a radical subjectivization that she termed world alienation, which left us only with our own subjective truths, sealed off from any shared common sense. In a new essay, Marilynne Robinson argues for a reconciliation between science and religion. She writes that it is not simply that science deals with facts and religion with meaning; there are seeming facts of the world such as time and space that are impervious to scientific knowledge. And religion, while it offers traditions of meaningfulness, must grapple with the meaning of a scientific world aimed at progress.12-11-2022
Is Antisemitism a Virus?
Roger BerkowitzDavid Marchese interviews Tom Stoppard about the rising virus of antisemitism.
12-04-2022
Antisemitism and White Supremacy
Michael Eric Dyson has a courageous op-ed in which he moves on from acknowledging both Jewish racism and black antisemitism to recognizing “antisemitism as a toxic species of the white supremacy that threatens Black security and democracy’s future.”12-04-2022
The Tyranny of Rankings
Roger BerkowitzYale and Harvard law schools have led a small movement of leading law schools refusing to participate in the corrupt practice of ranking schools led by institutions such as U.S. News & World Report. Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, explains why these rankings are not only silly, but dangerous.
12-04-2022
A Simple Tale that Undid a Totalitarian System
Roger BerkowitzRobin Ashenden writes about the seismic significance of the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which appeared Sixty years ago last week.
11-27-2022
What’s the Point of Museums?
Roger BerkowitzThere is a yearning for a truly non-biased and fully-inclusive museum. And since such a museum and such a show cannot exist, one group of curators have asked, "What's the Point of Museums?"
11-27-2022
Racism and Institutional Change
Roger BerkowitzJohn McWhorter, very much like Corey Robin, also argues that the left needs to change its focus from questions of recognition to questions of power. For McWhorter, evidence of the mistake made by contemporary leftist politics is the language of “systematic racism.”
11-27-2022
Capitalism and Empathy
Roger BerkowitzFor Corey Robin, the history of the last 300 years teaches us that the most important political struggles are about who can regulate the market. Whoever does so will determine where power rests. And that is the lesson Robin argues the present-day left is refusing to learn.
11-27-2022
What we learned
The midterm elections saw many crazy Trump-identified candidates lose, which dragged down the Republican Party and allowed the Democrats to hold the Senate. As of now, however, Republican candidates did win the popular vote. What is more, the Republicans continued to make strong inroads into core Democratic constituencies in Hispanic and Black voters, as well as college-educated white women in the suburbs.11-20-2022